d she would ask the spirits what had made
Adelaide ill and what would cure her.

She moved my furniture until she left the centre of the room clear; she
squatted down, and hanging her head began muttering in an
unintelligible dialect. Presently her voice ceased and we heard from
beside her a most peculiar whistling sort of voice, to which she
responded, evidently interrogating. Again the whistling voice from
further away. Bootha then told me she had asked a dead black fellow,
Big Joe, to tell her what she wanted to know; but he could not, so now
she was going to ask her dead granddaughter. Again she said a sort of
incantation, and again, after a while, came the whistling voice
reply--this time from another direction, not quite so loud. The same
sort of thing was gone through with the same result.

Then Bootha said she would ask Guadgee, a black girl who had been one
of my first favourites in the camp, and who had died a few years
previously.

The whistling voice came from a third direction, though all the time I
could see Bootha's lips moving.

Guadgee answered all she was asked. She said Adelaide was made ill
because she had offended the spirits by bathing in the creek under the
shade of a Minggah, or spirit-tree, a place tabooed to all but
wirreenuns, or such as hold communion with spirits.

Of course, according to the blacks, to disturb a shadow is to hurt the
original.

In this Minggah, Guadgee said, were swarms of bees invisible to all
but wirreenuns, and they are ready always to resent any insult to the
Minggah or its shadow. These spirit-bees had entered Adelaide and
secreted some wax on her liver; their bites, Guadgee said, were on her
back.

Well, that can't be it, I said, I for you never did bathe in the shade
of a Minggah; for, going as you always do with the house-girls, you are
bound to be kept from such sacrilege; they would never dare such
desecration.'

'Which is their Minggah? Is it a big Coolabah between the Bend and the
garden?'

'Yes.'

'Then I did bathe there the last time I went down. I was up too late to
go with the Black-but-Comelys, and as the sun was hot I went further
round the point and bathed in the shade. And the bee-bites must be
those horribly irritating pimples I have across my back.'

The cause of illness settled to her satisfaction, Bootha asked how to
cure it. The patient was to drink nothing hot nor heating but as much
cold water as she liked, especially a long drink